Friends are great, but friends are better when they enjoy drinking grappa with you. A word of advice to those who still play drinking games: grappa should never ever be your weapon of choice unless you are supremely confident of victory. (I speak from experience, having weathered a particularly ugly and painful defeat at the hands of a backgammon wizard.) It does, however, make for <a href = "http://aaronland.net/weblog/grappa_cake.shtml">excellent chocolate cake</a>.